


white stained red

by WisdomPearl



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Asano Gakushuu Needs A Hug, Asano Gakushuu-centric, Blood, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, Music, Piano
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29116785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WisdomPearl/pseuds/WisdomPearl
Summary: Asano just wants to practice the piano, but finds himself dealing with problems farther than the keys on the piano.
Kudos: 23





	white stained red

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone interested, the piece Asano is playing is Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, K. 545.

Asano had never felt less in control of himself in his life than he did at this moment.

He was just practicing at home, the smooth keys shiny and clean under his sweaty palms. There were no audience members waiting anxiously for his success (or more noticeably, his failures and slip-ups) or a camera staring coldly into his soul. It was just him, the plant that sat next to the window built into the wall near the piano, and the air conditioner that blasted a few yards away.

He felt something crawl up inside his chest, but he digressed. He would only focus on the piece he was practicing, not the thing that tickled at him from the inside.

He played the two C’s, jumpstarting the first movement.

Asano hadn’t really thought too much about the sonata as his fingers flew from key to key. He reached the hard passage, not skipping a beat or hesitating. He worked hard on that measure! He wouldn’t allow such an untamed beast to hinder his performance.

Four note trill. Rhythm was crucial here. The notes were light, bouncy, and full of happiness and life. But Asano was full of concentration and focus. He felt as if he hadn’t the time to consider the emotion, since his dynamics and swells would convey a sufficient amount of emotion. Just enough for him to not sound like a human metronome.

Though he wondered, as he got to the right-hand trill near the end of the first section, what he really sounded like next to a pianist of equal talent but overflowing with emotion.

He reached the repeat sign, where the rhythm-based passage ended. He wouldn’t take this repeat though, since he had been hardwired into ignoring them. The strawberry blonde jumped straight into the second section, hitting the black keys full of satisfaction.

The feeling inside him tickled his throat again, almost as if it were threatening to break through to the surface. He nearly faltered slightly on the scales, struggling to keep up the composed facade.

He wasn’t quite sure why he decided to hide his emotions at this moment. His father was out to dinner (again) with his business friends and the like. The notes of the opened piano lid streamed out into the air, wafting around in swirls before being drowned out by the next notes. It wasn’t as if anyone was judging him. He didn’t play so loud that the neighbors next door could hear (it was, in fact, the other way around but with pop music, until his father had a three minute talk with them), so no one could really judge him even indirectly.

Yet it was as if his fingers were already conditioned to act this way: reserved and focused. It was as if he were teetering on the edge of a gaping canyon, or perhaps during a festival judging. Well, the feelings were pretty much the same in both scenarios, Asano figured.

It was as if his body couldn’t fully comprehend that he had freedom to do whatever he wanted in this situation. In fact, he didn’t even have to play right now. He could sneak out and go places he’d never been, eat foods he’d never tasted, or freely be with people for once in his life. It wasn’t like his father had ordered him to practice piano (he used to, but Asano figured that his old man had forgotten to care about such minute details about his son).

He had finally finished the scales, slowing down slightly to jump into the next section, which was very similar to the first section. Quickly jumping back up to the normal tempo, he focused on the difficult passage again.

Music is really just a lot of repetition, something he thought about a lot. Pop music consisted of repeating chords, music in general had a lot of repetition, something that Asano coincidentally experienced as he willed his left hand into a second passage.

The ending of the first movement came in a flash, passage after passage after passage until he reached the ending trill. Another passage came before his graceful ending, his hands lifting up from the keys about half a foot before he brought them back down to his laps.

Shuffling his feet around to relax his knees for a little bit, he lifted his hands up back to the white keys to begin the second movement.

This was the calm, soothing movement of the sonata, contrasting the previous playful, light movement. It was significantly slower as well, so Asano felt like he could relax a little.

Only a little though. Just because a piece was slower doesn't mean that it’ll be easier. Asano learned this early on, way too many times for him to even want to recall. The important thing is that he was successfully hardwired into focusing on the current piece, regardless of its composition.

So, he trained the majority of his focus on the fingers skillfully dashing above the white keys. He figured that if someone were to quietly walk into the house, he wouldn’t be able to notice them. Quite a dark thought, but it was a thought that swirled in his head nevertheless.

This was a long movement: slow tempo, four pages long. It was slow, peaceful, relaxing, contrasting to Asano at the current moment.

It was just a lot of focus. The sheer amount of focus (and some bits of hope and luck) that he was pouring into the keys was immense and invisible. A third party watching him from the sidelines would not even begin to comprehend the exact amount of determination that Asano was using to get through this seemingly easy, expressive movement.

He sometimes wondered if he could let loose and relax, but his arms were stubborn and refused such a preposterous action. Why relax when you can focus? That sort of inferiority complex spiraled the boy down hell’s tunnel every time he thought about it. So most of the time, he often decided to just not think about it. Easy, right? Unfortunately, that usually wasn’t the case.

Halfway through the movement, he reached the minor section of the movement, pressing the weight of his arm into the black keys as he expressed the desperation of that section. The dynamic swells and phrasing had convinced Asano that this was the most emotional section of the entire movement. For some reason, it clicked with him, the minor key feel and the dramatic, almost tragic, feeling of the phrases, it clicked in him. He sometimes wondered if that made him edgy.

The minor section ended, bringing him back to the first section as he approached the coda. His fingers were numb from the past two hours of practice, but it was as if his body didn’t care. That tickle in his chest reached his throat as he forced it down. It caught in the back of his throat before sliding back down painfully.

The coda came sooner than he thought as he forced himself to slow down more than usual to keep the original tempo. It was slightly painful, having to go slower than he would like to. Why did he have to care about his tempo in a practice setting? It wasn’t as if he was in a rush to record it or anything (he had already done that last week). Yet, he felt that if he let loose, he would worsen and worsen and destroy years of effort and practice.

He figured, as he reached the ending staccato passage, that that was probably the reason why he was so stiff in playing piano.

Hands floating back to his lap, he stared a stone-cold gaze into the propped-up lid of the grand piano.

The piano was polished to a T, the soft sunset reflecting its pink and purple hue onto the shiny, black body of the piano. Of course, it wasn’t very long until Asano shifted his gaze back onto the black and white keys, bringing up his tired hands back to the battlefield.

It was the last movement, the shortest of them all. Two pages and at a relatively fun and fast pace, at least, that’s what the teacher told him.

The staccato was something that Asano worked on. It couldn’t be too long or it’ll lose its bubbly feel, but it couldn’t be too short, otherwise the human ear wouldn’t register it in a positive way. The balance was the result of focus and practice, only fueling his statement of not relaxing.

It was a bad thing to think and he knew that well. He had learned time and time again, through health classes and teacher consultation and episodes of passing out due to pure exhaustion. But it was an addictive habit, something that was rock-solid and nearly impossible to break.

Asano reached the middle section, the end of the first page and the beginning of the second. A lot of jumping around was performed flawlessly, but not without Asnao being intensely aware of his sweating hands and the cold sweat that existed and hung around his nape.

The tickle in his throat came back stronger, only motivating his body to rush the next section despite Asano’s perfectionist nature. It was too fast, too fast, too fast!

Asano had never felt less in control of himself in his life than he did at this moment.

He reached the trap passage, the ending coda of the movement and of the piece really. It was a trap passage, because the notes swirled and caused the body to rush that passage. And for some reason, it seemed as if his body had begun to panic even more and slow down rather than speed up. It was if his body was internally screaming, “No! Slow down, or we’ll break.”

Although, it felt as if he had broken already.

His fingers tingled with the previous sensation, his nerves burning slightly from the stimulation. But he reached the end, not in a very satisfactory way. Sure, the beginning was great and all, but the ending was such a mess that Asano had the urge to just bash his head onto the keys in frustration.

And he would’ve if the tickling sensation hadn’t turned into a stinging sensation in his throat.

Now that his hands were freed from the confines of Asano’s expectation, his stiffened fingers flew up to his mouth, covering whatever would come out. He would’ve gotten up, but the feeling was so terrible that he felt heavy and attached to the piano bench. No, why did it have to be here?

Petals leaked out of his lips, forcing its bloody way out onto the wooden floor. And when the first floated its way down to the ground, more followed, blood coating the insides of his mouth and streaming out from the corners of his mouth in thin, blood red trickles.

A couple of blood spatters from the shock had made its way onto the piano keys, the little red beads decorating the middle of the keys. As the petals flowed out and decreased, Asano realized that he would have to clean up the mess.

The mess that resulted from his unrequited love.


End file.
